Formerly OP #11: Old Darius

Riot rewrote one sentence of one tooltip five separate times across three years, and it still wasn't enough.

Dunkmaster Darius, designed by Riot CertainlyT, was the first champion that designer released, and the one that made him notorious in the community for creating overpowered designs. Following him up with Thresh and Yasuo certainly just made things worse.

Formerly OP

Old Darius

Seasons 2 & 3 · Ended Patch 5.16

Riot rewrote one sentence of one tooltip five separate times across three years, and it still wasn't enough.

Every other champion in 2012 had a ceiling on how much a single teamfight could go their way. You could get caught, you could lose the fight, but somewhere in there the enemy carry ran out of buttons. Darius didn't have that ceiling. Noxian Guillotine [R] refreshes itself every time it killed somebody, at every rank, and it dealt true damage that scaled with a bleed he'd already applied by accident. So the fight didn't end when he killed your ADC. It reset. Watching a Darius walk into four people at 30% health and walk out with a quadra wasn't a highlight reel moment back then. It was Tuesday.

The main difference back then was his Q was basically instant and if you were caught in his E even flashing would whip you right back into his clutches.

When, And For How Long

Darius launched on May 23, 2012, in Patch V1.0.0.140, right in the middle of Season 2, and he stayed a defining top laner through Season 3. His fall came in two very different shapes. First Riot spent three years quietly rewriting the one line of text that made him inevitable. Then, on August 20, 2015, Patch 5.16 shipped the Juggernaut update and replaced most of the rest of him.

What makes him unusual in this series is that he never actually stopped being good. Old Jax and old Udyr got dismantled. Darius got redesigned around the exact thing that made him a problem, and the redesign kept it.

The Old Kit

The passive icon below is the original pre-update art, which Riot redrew when the Juggernaut update landed. The other four icons are unchanged from the version described here, so what you're looking at in those four slots is genuinely what old Darius had on his bar.

Passive: Hemorrhage

No five-stack payoff back then. Hemorrhage [Passive] just scaled cleanly with every stack, so there was no threshold to survive to and no moment where the danger visibly arrived. It was already there at two.

Q: Decimate

No wind-up, no cast time, no radius indicator. Decimate [Q] simply happened the instant he pressed it, applied Hemorrhage [Passive] with both the blade and the handle, and cost almost no mana. There was no healing attached, because he didn't need any.

W: Crippling Strike

Crippling Strike [W] came off cooldown faster for every Hemorrhage [Passive] stack already sitting on you when it landed. The more he'd hurt you, the more often he got to do it again.

E: Apprehend

Apprehend [E] is where he stopped being a balance problem and started being a bug. It read enemy positions at cast time, so leaving the pull zone did nothing. Flash out, dash out, walk out, and the game whipped you back to wherever you'd started anyway.

R: Noxian Guillotine

Twenty seconds to recast is the modern rule. The old one refreshed the cooldown outright, so respawning and walking back to lane bought you nothing: Noxian Guillotine [R] was up again before you arrived. Clones counted as kills too, so a Leblanc or Shaco who split and got caught handed him the reset and then the real target.

Why It Was OP

Plenty of champions in 2012 hit hard. Darius was a problem for structural reasons, and every one of them fed the same loop.

The reset wasn't on a timer. Most snowball mechanics have a time limit and if you run for long enough it's done. This old version wasn't on a timer and he could dunk whenever he pleased.

His damage was difficult to understand. Nowadays people are well aware that giving Darius 5 stacks is certain doom. Back then when he was new, players would trade with him, feel like it was going well then suddenly start losing health faster than expected.

[E] was extra buggy. Escaping his Apprehend [E] should have been as easy as leaving the pull zone. Instead, you'd get yanked back through the nether into his clutches randomly.

Nothing about him was conditional. No stealth to detect, no stacking mechanic to interrupt, no cast time to dodge, no ramp-up. Decimate [Q] was instant. Noxian Guillotine [R] was point and click. Apprehend [E] pulled in a cone. Every part of his kit worked the same in a 1v1 as it did in a 5v5, on any build, at any point in the game.

Three Years, One Sentence

The most interesting thing about old Darius isn't the kit. It's the paper trail. Riot never once tried to delete the reset. They kept trying to find a version of it that a normal person could play against, and the record of those attempts reads like a slow argument with themselves.

V1.0.0.140b arrived almost immediately and clarified that Noxian Guillotine [R] only refreshed when it landed the killing blow itself, closing off the free resets he'd been collecting. V1.0.0.142 stopped it refreshing on champion clones, because killing a Shaco decoy didn't punish him for ulting the wrong target.

Patch 3.03 in early Season 3 made the real change: the full cooldown refresh became a 12 second recast window instead, and his base cooldown went up to 120/100/80 seconds from a flat 100. That's the version that stuck, and it's the ancestor of what he has today. Patch 4.1 stretched the recast window back out to 20 seconds. Patch 5.7 then gave part of the original back, refunding mana on a kill and fully resetting the cooldown again at max rank.

Five changes to one mechanic across three years, and the mechanic survived all five.

The Fall

Patch 5.16 landed on August 20, 2015 as part of the Juggernaut update, and it changed almost everything except the thing everyone complained about.

Hemorrhage [Passive] switched from magic damage to physical, lost the movement speed per bleeding enemy, and gained the mechanic that defines him now: hit five stacks on a champion and Darius enrages, gaining a large chunk of attack damage and applying full stacks on hit for the next few seconds. Decimate [Q] picked up a 0.75 second wind-up with a visible radius and started healing him off the blade. Crippling Strike [W] lost its cooldown reduction per stack and its attack speed slow, trading them for a much heavier movement slow. Apprehend [E] gained a 90% slow on the pull. Noxian Guillotine [R] had its base damage cut, but every follow-up cast inside the window became free.

Read that list and the design goal is obvious. Riot didn't want to stop Darius from dunking. They wanted the moment before the dunk to be something you could see coming.

Where He Stands Now

Modern Darius is a healthy, popular, thoroughly frightening top laner who does very nearly the same thing. Noxian Guillotine [R] still refreshes on a killing blow. Hemorrhage [Passive] still stacks to five and still feeds the execute. He still wins nearly every extended melee fight he chooses to take.

What changed is the information you get. Decimate [Q] telegraphs itself now, so standing in it is a decision rather than an ambush [Q]. Apprehend [E] pulls you, but the pull and the slow are one readable moment instead of a silent yank. The bleed builds toward a visible enrage rather than a silent multiplier on an ability you can't see the damage of until it hits you. He's still a countdown, but the clock is on your screen.

Nominate The Next One

Darius is the rare entry in this series where the answer wasn't a nerf or a burial. Riot spent three years arguing with a single tooltip line, lost, and built the modern champion around it instead. Look through the rest of the series below and tell us who you'd like to see next in the comments.